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An Encounter
An Encounter is the second story in James Joyce's Dubliners. It follows an unnamed schoolboy narrating his day of playing hooky from school with his friend Mahony. Characters Narrator (Unnamed) '-' A young, Irish schoolboy who, after growing tired of the daily routine of school and games of Cowboys & Indians with his classmates, decides to play hooky from school for a day, with dire consequences. 'Mahony -' The narrator's classmate, who comes along on his day of playing hooky from school. 'The Old Stranger -' An old pedophile the narrator and Mahony first meet in a large field. 'Father Butler -' The boy's teacher. Not at all fond of their boyish games and halfpenny marvels. 'Joe Dillon -' One of the narrator's classmates who introduces the group to playing Cowboys & Indians. 'Leo Dillon -' Joe's brother. Agreed to skip school with the narrator and Mahony but never ends up showing up. Synopsis A young, unnamed narrator recalls playing Cowboys & Indians and reading Halfpenny Marvels with his classmates Joe and Leo Dillon. However, the narrator expresses dissatisfaction with these meaningless games. He says he would rather go out into the world and experience a real adventure, sort of an escape from the artificial adventures he and his friends partake in every afternoon. He convinces Leo Dillon and another friend, Mahony, to skip school the next day and have an adventure out in the wharfs. Once the agreed upon date arrives, Mahony and the narrator meet, but Leo Dillon is nowhere to be found. The two boys condemn Leo as a "funk" for ditching them and decide to continue on their adventure themselves. The two boys continued on through the streets, causing mayhem in their wake: chasing after girls with their slingshots, and being chased after by a group of boys harassing them thinking they were Protestants. They then continued on to the wharfs and throughout the rest of Dublin. They realized it was too late to visit the Pigeon House as they had planned, so instead they decide to simply hang around an empty field for the remainder of their day off. There they are alone until an old strange man, "shabbily dressed in a suit of greenish-black", walks up to them and begins to ask them about if they have any sweethearts, saying "Every boy has a little sweetheart." Both the narrator and Mahony are disturbed by the strange behavior of the old man. When the old man briefly walks away for a minute or so, presumably to masturbate, Mahony exclaims "I say! Look what he’s doing! I say... He’s a queer old josser!" The two of them, deeply disturbed by the man's strange behavior, decide to adopt false names, "Murphy" and "Smith", in case the stranger asked. After this, the old man returns to continue talking to the boys, but Mahony is distracted by a stray cat and runs off chasing it, leaving the narrator and the old pervert all alone. The stranger noted that Mahony was "a very rough boy" and asked the narrator if he was often punished in school. The narrator remains silent as the man continues on talking about how boys "ought to be whipped and well whipped." Seeming to have abandoned his earlier compassion for young love, the man goes on to say that "if ever he found a boy talking to girls or having a girl for a sweetheart he would whip him and whip him." Terrified by the man's new, even more disturbing attitude, the narrator says that he must go and calls out to Mahony to follow him. As he is walking away from the field and the stranger, with Mahony following suit, the narrator realizes that "in his heart he had always despised Mahony a little."